"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Ethshar 1 - The Misenchanted Sword" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

was, it didn't seem to have noticed him. He stood up again, then crouched and
began inching his way toward whatever it was, parting the grass carefully with
his hands.
As careful as he was, however, his movement was not silent. He stopped
again and listened.
The other had also stopped. For a tense moment, Valder waited. Then the
rustling began again, and the other moved away. Valder followed, trying to
move only when the other moved, but the rustling of his own passage drowned
out the other's noise and made it very difficult to judge when the other had
stopped.
A few feet from the spot where he had sat and dumped out his boots Valder
found himself at the northern edge of the dry hummock, facing a wide, shallow
channel. He eased his foot into it until the sole of his boot was resting on
solid bottom, sunk an inch or two into muck. His other foot followed, until he
was standing in six inches of foul-smelling water and three inches of goo.
Both feet were once again thoroughly soaked.
He waded across the channel, moving slowly so as not to splash. No grass
grew in the center of the channel, and the reeds were not thick, so that he
was able to proceed without making very much noise. He heard new sounds ahead,
not rustlings, but clatterings, as if things were being casually moved about.
He reached the far side of the channel and slogged up the bank, pushing
aside reeds and grass; he paused at the top to peer ahead.
The gray point was not in sight, but something else was, something
yellow-brown, warm and inviting in the setting sun. It looked very much like a
thatched roof. From his previous viewpoint it had blended with the surrounding
foliage.
He was so intrigued by this evidence of a human habitation where he had
expected none that he forgot his pursuers for the moment and made his way
toward the roof without first checking behind. He knew that the inhabitant was
just as likely to be a northerner as an Ethsharite, but if the gray thing had
indeed been a hat, then whoever wore it was probably not a soldier. Valder was
armed and reasonably capable. He had the sword on his hip and a dagger on his
belt; a sling was tucked away. He wore a breastplate of good steel. His helmet
had been lost two days earlier, and he had abandoned his bow when he had run
out of reusable arrows, but he still felt confident that he could handle any
civilian, whether northerner, Ethsharite, or unknown.
One reason for his intense interest in the roof was that its mysterious
owner might well have a boat, since he or she lived here in a coastal marsh --
and that might save Valder the trouble of building a raft, as well as being
safer and more comfortable.
He crept forward through the tall grass, across another dry patch, then
through a reed-clogged expanse of water and mud and over another hummock, and
found himself looking at a tidy little hut. The walls were plastered over with
yellowish baked mud or clay; wooden shutters covered the two small windows on
the near side. The roof, as he had thought, was thatch. A doorway faced the
ocean, with a heavy drape hooked back to leave it mostly open. Seated in the
doorway opening was the hut's inhabitant, an old man in a gray robe, his tall,
pointed hat perched on one knee. He was leaning back against the frame,
staring out over the sea at the setting sun. The hut was built on the highest
bit of land in the marsh, but faced down a short, steep, bare slope, giving a